Maureen EppenEvery Family is Different (Serenity Press)
illustrated by Veronica Rooke
CHILDREN’S PICTURE BOOK

I met the lovely Maureen Eppen some years ago when she invited me to Secret Harbour to talk to the First Edition Book Club, a group of passionate readers who have been meeting now for 14 years. They were erudite, engaged and insightful, and it was a pleasure to discuss Elemental with them.

Since then, Maureen’s path and mine have crossed many times and in different contexts, but it was only last year that I discovered that she was also hard at work on her own creative projects. Every Family is Different is the first to be published, and I’m delighted to feature it here.

First, a little more about Maureen:

Maureen Eppen has been a freelance journalist for more than 30 years and now works in corporate communications and marketing. She writes book reviews and author interviews, hosts the Shelf Aware blog series, and is a grammar nerd who frequently questions her own spelling and punctuation. When she’s not procrastinating over working on her first novel, Maureen practises yoga, and she has completed two half-marathons and countless fun runs—at a glacial pace.

And here is the book’s blurb:

Who’s in your family?

Some children live with their mum and dad, others live with their grandparents or foster parents. Some live in a big house, others live in a tiny apartment.

With captivating illustrations, Every Family is Different celebrates what it means to be part of a family, and reminds us that there’s something that’s always the same in every family…

Over to Maureen…

2 things that inspired my book

My mum, Maureen O’Donnell, is a compassionate, generous and loving woman, and this book would never have been written without her unwavering belief in me. Mum left her family and friends in England to support my dad in his desire to relocate to Australia in the 1960s, only to find herself bringing up my sisters and me single-handedly just a few years later, with no relatives to support her. As a result, family is incredibly important to all of us. This sentiment is also embraced by my daughters and their cousins, and we are now welcoming the next generation to our extended family.

While I was lucky to grow up in a positive, welcoming neighbourhood, I’ve heard of situations in which children being brought up by single parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents or same-sex parents have felt ostracised or somehow ‘less’ than others. I wanted my book to highlight that there’s no such thing as a ‘typical’ family these days. Families come in a variety of shapes, sizes and configurations—but love is a common element to them all.

2 places connected to my book

Home—literally and figuratively. I wrote the earliest drafts for this picture book, and others, in my home office, where I worked as a freelance journalist while my daughters were growing up. I also feel a sense of ‘home’ whenever I spend time with my family and closest friends, and they have been incredibly supportive of my journey towards becoming a published author.

There is also a strong connection to my childhood home, in the suburb of Calista, south of Perth, where I grew up in the 1970s. A child’s life in those days was carefree and physically active—with parks and bushland to explore, school within walking or cycling distance, and playtime inspired by imagination rather than spent in front of a screen. Friends lived ‘just around the corner’, and we were free to spend happy days outdoors, as long as we were home when the street lights came on.

2 favourite images

The image of two dads and their baby was illustrator Veronica Rooke’s initial concept of a ‘non-traditional’ family. When Monique Mulligan from publisher Serenity Press showed it to me for the first time, I burst into tears of joy. All of Veronica’s illustrations perfectly reflect what I wanted my words to convey, and I love the way Serenity Press has combined my words and Veronica’s artwork in this beautiful book.

Every page of the book resonates with me, because the families I describe exist within my extended family and among friends and neighbours. Having said that, I have enjoyed the reactions from readers when they see the penultimate pages, which describe families that include ‘one person and a pet…or lots and lots of pets’. The pictures accompanying these words always delight.